Customers of many organizations frequently have questions that must be answered by trained technical employees in a customer service department. For example, users of a computer software product typically will have technical questions that can only be answered by employees that are very familiar with the software. Usually, these questions are submitted in the form of a telephone call, or an electronic mail ("e-mail") message.
Because hiring and training employees to respond to customer questions is expensive, it is desirable for organizations to be able to reduce the number of employees required and/or reduce the training required for each employee. One known way of reducing the training required for each employee is to utilize a database that includes answers to frequently asked questions. Typically, the employee will extract keywords from a customer's question and query the database based on these key words. The answer retrieved from the database hopefully is responsive to the customer's questions. Using this method, the employee only needs to know how to extract keywords, and does not have to be thoroughly trained on the product.
However, one problem with relying on keyword extractions to respond to questions is that the answers to the questions are not always correct. For example, using keyword extractions, the answer to the following two questions will likely be the same because they include the same keywords:
1) How fast can I get the latest version of the software? PA1 2) Is there software that I can get that responds faster than the version I have?
However, the appropriate answers to these questions should not be the same. Therefore, using only keyword extraction to receive answers to questions requires a customer service employee to manually review the answers. If the answers are not manually reviewed, the customer is frequently going to be dissatisfied with the answers because they may not be correct.
Based on the foregoing, there is a need for an customer service system that does not rely on keywords to provides answers to customer questions, and that is automated to reduce the need for employees.